Information security is the practice of defending information from unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, perusal, inspection, recording, or destruction. The breadth and depth of information security threats is increasing exponentially, particularly as individuals, organized crime, nation states, as well as hactivist groups continue to realize monetary and promotional gain from attacks on cyber infrastructure. Accordingly, enterprises such as business entities, companies, organizations, government agencies, and the like, must take action to protect their operations, systems, data, and the data of their partners and customers from such threats. To be successful, these actions must provide the broadest possible reach across the enterprise's environment and cross many different types of functions and facets of operations. This is necessary to mitigate gaps and address physical, technological, and procedural elements of the enterprise's security posture. An enterprise's security measures are only as effective as its weakest link
Many enterprises will utilize some form of a security management system to protect their confidential and valuable information. Current security management systems may provide specific security components with specific functions, such as, for example, endpoint protection, network access, file systems protection, or pattern analysis identification which may result in filtering network traffic into and out of the enterprise for malicious code such as viruses and worms, limiting access to inappropriate external content on the internet from inside the enterprise, and preventing attacks and other intrusions on the enterprise network.
Despite the current offering of sophisticated security systems, many enterprises struggle to understand their current security posture, and further lack the ability to measure the effectiveness of their current security policies in addressing security threats. Furthermore, existing security management systems are focused on a specific vulnerability scope. While they are very effective in monitoring certain elements and presenting data and information related to that scope, they lack the breadth of data collection and processing to cover an organization's overall security exposure. Thus the organization is left assuming the risks associated with an area not monitored, which results in a weak link that is most at risk for exploitation.
Furthermore, current security systems generally lack capability to deal with people, processes, technology infrastructure, and all facets of interaction with partners and customers. Securing the data and information resources of an organization is not solely an exercise of firewalling network traffic or keeping current with virus protection. As evidenced by highly publicized retail and banking breaches, security is a function of people-based processes and interfaces with third parties and their systems. In some cases, an organization may be unaware of an attack or breach until after the effects are noticed by employees and/or customers.
Even with sophisticated security systems for threat monitoring and detection, organizations struggle to understand the data provided. As such, organizations are left with the responsibility to pull information from various limited-scope security systems, as well as people-based processes to build a security program, figuring out what is needed to share with the organization and determine what actions to take. The challenges of running an information security program can be overwhelming. There are many areas to address—from encryption, to application security, to disaster recovery. Furthermore, there is the complication of compliance with regulatory requirements such as HIPAA, PCI DSS and Sarbanes-Oxley, just to name a few. Accordingly, organizations struggle with gaps and inconsistencies in capabilities across the spectrum of their security posture and are left with an inefficient security posture which is vulnerable to security threats.